The Wright Company: From Invention to Industry

8. Managing the Wrights’ Company

Introduction 129 8 Managing the Wrights’ Company Early Wright Company advertisements boasted that Wilbur and Orville Wright personally supervised the designing and building of “everything that enters into the construction of our machines”at the factory. For once, advertisements did not lie. The brothers knew that the Wright Company was a different sort of business than their previous printing and bicycle ventures, and maintaining such close, personal oversight was not their stated intent during the company ’s first days. In December 1909 they wrote to accountant and future Wright School student and aviation designer Albert Merrill, “We have a considerable stock in the company and are serving in official capacities, though we will not have the care of The Wright Company: From Invention to Industry 130 the general business,” suggesting that they recognized at some level their lack of experience in running the sort of company they hoped would be a major firm of national scope. Professional management, it seemed, would be required, and the company proceeded to hire Frank H. Russell (1910–11) and Grover C. Loening (1913–14) to fill that role. But Russell and Loening would find that the Wrights’ statement to Merrill did not reflect reality. Instead, Wilbur and OrvilleWright ,the onlyWright Company executives who lived in Dayton,became company executives unwilling to let others manage their business. Russell and Loening also found the New York–based corporate secretary and treasurer,Alpheus F.Barnes—who had his own management conflicts with theWrights—a difficult man for whom to work and attempt to craft a profitable enterprise.1 DifficultiesbetweenRussell,theWrightCompany’sgeneralmanagerfrom January 1910 until October 1911, arose early in his tenure in Dayton. Russell’s more privileged upbringing and education, his more extroverted personality, and his previous corporate experience set him apart from the Wrights. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio, but raised principally in the Northeast, where his Congregationalist clergyman father worked as secretary for the Evangelical Alliance for the United States of America and led congregations in New York and Connecticut. His maternal grandfather, Russell A. Alger, a Republican, served as governor of Michigan,William McKinley’s first secretary of war,and U.S. senator; Wright Company director Russell Alger, Jr. (Russell A. Alger’s son) was his uncle (though only five years his senior). A 1900 Yale College graduate who gained business experience working for his uncle in Canada, Russell arrived in Dayton from the presidency of the Automatic Hook and Eye Company, a zipper and fastener manufacturer in Hoboken, New Jersey. Automatic Hook and Eye was faring poorly in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907, and Russell, who was owed over $8,000 in back pay, was eager to find a new opportunity. He quickly took the managerial reins in Dayton when they were offered to him. He became the only Dayton-based company official with previous experience in running a corporation to ever have a significant role in the Wright Company’s daily operations. When hired, he understood that the Wright Company wanted him to“have general oversight of details of construction sales contracts etc.” Indeed, the company had told him as much in his appointment letter from the brothers, which placed him under the“general direction” of the company president but expected him shortly to“assume full charge of the management of the company’s business.” But Russell quickly learned that he was working for two headstrong brothers, men who were unable to put their words to him into action.2 Managing the Wrights’ Company 131 Letters and contracts aside, Russell was never given full charge of company management. The corporate chain of command bypassed him, leaving him continually frustrated. During his time working in Dayton he found the Wrights meddlesome and critical supervisors who provided little constructive guidance and interfered in his efforts to create a profitable business, while the brothers found him to be incompetent.While remembered by machinist Tom Russell as someone liked by the workers on the factory floor, his workplace personality jarred with the introverted Wrights. As Russell left the company, in 1911, his uncle wrote rather cryptically that he (Alger) could “quite easily see where Frank Russell’s personality has to a certain extent worked against him in his work” and that he agreed with Wilbur Wright’s view that Russell “disturb[ed] the general organization.” Russell, however, believed that Wright disturbed his organization. Earlier that year, Russell wrote in his diary...